District 5 Diary

Thursday, April 30, 2015

Parking meters for the neighborhoods

A reader sends this:

RE: Adding new meters and parking restrictions in the Eastern Neighborhoods

Tony Kelly[below] is correct. Quite a few of us were present at the Board of Supervisors meeting when Ed Reiskin claimed that if the board approved the amended contract for new meters, there would not be sufficient meters to add any additional ones. They would be replacing old meters only.

The Supervisors voted unanimously to support the amendment to restrict the neighborhood meters and I think Supervisor Kim voted against the contract because she felt it had no legal teeth. Will she be proven right now?

Thanks Supervisor Kim for your letter requesting that the SFMTA meet with the neighbors prior to the hearing and for your offer to help facilitate that meeting.

If the SFMTA wants the residents in the area to commute via public transit, they will need to park their cars somewhere all day. Removing parking removes that option which puts more cars on the road. Is this the results SFMTA wants?

Mari Eliza

Transportation Chair, CSFN

***

This sudden proposal for meters and a parking management plan for Showplace Square without community engagement flies in the face of three commitments previously made by the MTA:

1) a repeated promise from Director of Transportation Ed Reiskin to members of the Board of Supervisors, including Supervisors Kim and Cohen, that there could be no installation of a significant number of new meters in the Eastern Neighborhoods without the MTA going back to the Board, due to budgetary and contractual restraints;

2) repeated promises from Director Reiskin and MTA staff dating back to early 2012 that the MTA would work with the neighborhoods to develop new parking management plans with the support and consensus of those neighborhoods;

3) repeated promises from Director Reiskin and MTA staff, while working for the past two years with merchants, residents and stakeholders in the NE Mission and the Eastern Neighborhoods, to settle parking management issues and planning for the NE Mission before moving on to Showplace Square and then Dogpatch.

This current proposal scheduled for hearing on Friday is disrespectful to the neighborhoods and to the Board of Supervisors, and it should be cancelled so the MTA can finally begin to live up to some of its repeated promises.

Latest on bicycle count report: "available in mid-May"

These things evidentlytake time. The annual bicycle count was last September, but since the MTA has been pretty busy making all those "improvements" to our streets maybe they just haven't had time to get the report done.

Or maybe they're a little short-handed, since they only have 5,359 employees. Reiskin himself has been busy working on some Big Thoughts in op-eds.

We were told in March that the report would be released at the end of that month. Two weeks ago they were still "finalizing the data" on the count, though we suspect it's not about the "data" but about how they're going to explain disappointing numbers.

Reiskin and the MTA must be gratified at all the attention this report is getting. I used to be one of the few people in the city who even read the reports.

The count reports are usually issued in December after a September count: here and here.